Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. And this, believe it or not, is the 200th

regular episode of Mindscape. I say regular because there's been a lot more episodes if you count

various bonuses and the ask me anything episodes and holiday messages and things like that,

but 200 is pretty good. At roughly 50 a year, that's four years. This is the fourth anniversary of Mindscape. So

pretty long compared to many

projects that people launch in various points of their careers. And I've been very very gratified with all of the

responses from people listening and hoping that it does some good. So

want to do something to celebrate. So I thought I'd do a solo episode, which is often what I do in these situations.

And meanwhile, I have going on this shift from Los Angeles and Caltech to Baltimore and Johns Hopkins,

where I will be a professor of natural philosophy, which is a title that I made up to indicate that I'll be both doing

philosophy and physics really secretly its physics, but it's the kind of physics that fits into a philosophy department very well.

There's no boundary between these two areas, right? In both cases, you're thinking hard, trying to understand

the fundamental workings of reality. That's what I'm interested in doing. So I don't perceive a barrier, but because of

various ways in which academia has evolved over the years, there is quite a substantial barrier that other people perceive.

So I thought that because this is happening and because this is the 200th episode, for my solo episode, I would talk about

a particular set of issues that count as

natural philosophy in this sense, the intersection of physics and philosophy. And furthermore, some of the ways in which physics and philosophy

intersect are pretty well known. You've heard about them before. We've talked a lot about quantum mechanics and the collapse of the wave function, foundations of quantum mechanics.

We've also talked a lot about time, the arrow of time and entropy and

emergence, the connections between fundamental physics and higher levels. So all those things are

recognizable obvious places where both physics and philosophy have something to say.

There's another area which has been sometimes remarked on, but not quite as much, which is cosmology.

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